


Ghosts of a Future Loss

by maddieaddam



Category: The Pacific (TV)
Genre: Background Character Death, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Implied Relationships, M/M, Mild Smut, Mutual Masturbation, Period-Typical Racism, Psychological Trauma, Skinny Dipping, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-19
Updated: 2017-04-19
Packaged: 2018-10-20 19:29:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,665
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10669290
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maddieaddam/pseuds/maddieaddam
Summary: Everyone's faces have changed so much when Bill Leyden reunites with them after Peleliu that he fears one face in particular might be lost to him forever.





	Ghosts of a Future Loss

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Français available: [Ghosts of a Future Loss](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11072961) by [Synonyma](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Synonyma/pseuds/Synonyma)



> This is a work of fiction inspired by and only intended to represent the roles played in the HBO miniseries The Pacific. No disrespect is meant to the real men of 1st Marine Division. 
> 
> Title is a misread of a track name by Clint Mansell, Ghosts of a Future Lost, but I liked this version better? Welcome to my first foray into De Leyden, as it's called over on Tumblr.

The hospital on Banika is a strange, lonely place just as much as it’s a place where Leyden can eat burgers, pound back bottles of Coca-Cola, and at least make a fair attempt at eight hours of sleep on a real cot every night, so he feels more relief than disappointment when he hears he’s being released. For every nightmare about Peleliu from which he’s awoken with his bedsheets drenched in cold sweat and his chest clenched up too tight to breathe, he’s passed hours staring at the ceiling lost in guilty rumination about who’s probably still alive, in one piece, right in the head, and who probably isn’t. 

Not that he can predict that kind of thing, of course, because ultimately no one can, so it mostly circles back around to something like: _but meanwhile I’m definitely fine here in the hospital getting this fuckin’ boo boo on my face treated, and they all must be thinking about what bullshit that is, just like I am._ Between that worry and apprehension, the relief still at war with disappointment in his heart, and pure excitement about getting to see his friends again, all he can say for sure about how he feels when he gets back to Pavuvu and members of the welcoming party ask is that he’s still alive and kicking.

“You didn’t have to go to all this trouble just for me, sir,” he tells one of the many officers with unfamiliar faces when he sees the lemonade stand, and all those pretty nurses wearing even crisper white than they did at the hospital, a white too crisp to comprehend here. The officer gives him a flat look and asks who he’s meant to be, then strides off with no attempt to hide his disapproval. Some welcome, he thinks, but it does raise the question of why this shindig is actually being thrown.

A few minutes later, he wishes he’d never found out the answer.

Absolutely no one coming back from Peleliu would obviously have been the worst possible outcome, but Leyden knows the second he spots the line of dirty, slumped, staggering figures winding toward base camp that he’ll never be able to scrub the image from his mind. This will haunt him worse than any of the deaths or corpses; he knows that, and he has no choice but to accept it, no matter what it says about him as a person. 

As they move closer, he gets an entire mental photo album of images to join the first: Gene walks past him without a single flicker of recognition, his eyes chillingly vacant, and Snafu follows with an expression of such deferential concern that they almost seem to have swapped personalities in the hills of Peleliu; Burgie tries to congratulate him on his recovery, tries to offer him an encouraging smile, but can’t quite get out from behind the mask of numb disbelief hiding his naturally kind face as he tells Leyden about Ack-Ack and Hillbilly. 

Christ, Leyden thinks in horror, what if that’s Burgie’s real, permanent face now? What if those are all their real faces now? He’s got some unpleasant scarring to show for his experience, but he’s never been a looker to start with; his friends could have equally permanent expressions of loss, of bewilderment, of icy detachment. 

A strange fear without focus or source floods his veins in a hit of pure adrenaline, and he grabs the nearest returning marine by the shoulder to demand if Jay De L’Eau made it back.

“De L’Eau… little guy with the squeaky voice? Yeah, he was up at the front.” As Leyden rushes off at the confirmation, he hears the guy shout something else after him, obviously just having recognized him as someone else from Peleliu: “Hey, where the fuck did _you_ go? Have a nice holiday?” 

Leyden can’t even put a last name to his face, though, so he’s not important. Jay is the most important thing right now. He can picture that timidly excited little smile Jay always gets on his face when they all start ribbing one another so clearly without even needing to close his eyes, and he thinks that’s it, that’s the thing Jay can’t have lost. If he doesn’t still smile like that sometimes, none of this shit will have been worth it.

His odd fondness for De L’Eau has snuck up on him when he wasn’t looking, then made itself too much at home to distinguish from the rest of his mental scenery as a new thing; he doesn’t know what he likes so much about Jay, really, or when he started liking it so much, or even if they’d become real friends by the time he was knocked out of the campaign. He knows very little about Jay De L’Eau and understands even less, but of the options he and Gene have been given for company since they arrived, Jay’s always stood out as most bearable and that has yet to change. 

Snafu’s an absolute fucking dick. Oswald made no secret of seeing it right away like Leyden did, and Leyden has no idea why Gene seemed to start taking to him after awhile, or why they’ve come back attached to the hip like that, but it just confirms that he’s right to have found a buddy other than Eugene Sledge. Burgie’s not bad, but he takes his rank and the role given him by it so seriously that Leyden finds it hard to imagine palling around with him in any real way. There are other riflemen Leyden doesn’t mind shooting the shit with, too, in a collegial sort of way.

Jay is just – quiet, and a bit weird in a way that captures Leyden’s attention without putting him off. Sometimes he seems scared of his own shadow, but other times he stands up for himself and his friends with such scowling ferocity that even Leyden is pleasantly taken aback. He’s a nice presence to press shoulder to shoulder with in a foxhole, always a bit nervous and over-alert like a prey animal but never completely lost to panic, just vigilant. And he’s self-contained in a way Leyden can’t quite put his finger on, except to say that it’s not the same as Snafu’s complete lack of vocal intonation and lifeless stare; Jay is present, always present in his face and body and in the moment, but his emotions don’t bleed out and stain others around him even when they seem to be at their peak. 

He’s got to be alright. He can’t be gone, or so severely changed he’s barely recognizable like the other guys. Leyden can’t imagine going back into battle without the Jay he knows at his side. 

If he was nearer the front of the line during their march back to camp, that means he could already be at his tent. That’s a sensible place for someone to go when they’re exhausted, filthy, starving, and possibly nursing an injury, and the most sensible place to check first, given that all those factors could’ve sent him to multiple places on the island afterward; with any luck, Leyden will find Jay rather than the starting point for a wild goose chase. 

He’s not feeling too lucky as he approaches what appears to be a deserted tent, but then he spots a shadow moving inside and breaks into a run, calling out before he can think better of the idea: “Jay! Jay, that you?” The figure inside jumps, and Leyden skids to a halt just inside the tent’s opening to find a wide-eyed, ashen-faced Jay De L’Eau staring at him as though he’s pointed a rifle right between his eyes.

“Leyden,” he says, his shoulders slumping, face twisting with guilt for some reason Leyden doesn’t even waste time trying to figure out. “Sorry, I – sorry. It’s good to see you. You weren’t hurt too badly at all, were you?”

Jay gives Leyden’s face a careful once-over with his dark, solemn eyes when he says that, which should be the big clue that he’s relieved rather than needling Leyden for staying away so long with a nothing wound. It should be, but all Leyden can hear in the words are echoes of all those recriminations that have bounced around his own head since he was pulled out of battle: _little ball peen hammer got a little ding an’ now it don’t work no more_ , he imagines Jay saying, even though those couldn’t be more obviously Snafu-inspired words unless he were right here drawling them into Leyden’s ear, and his stomach gives a painful lurch.

“Yeah, it was nothin’,” Leyden agrees as cheerfully as he can. “It _is_ nothin’. I got leather hide and a head made out of rock, the Japs’ll have to hit me with something way harder to take me out for good.”

A shadow passes across Jay’s face, and Leyden swears he’s gonna bend over and kick his own ass for saying something as stupid as _take me out for good_ , but then he smiles and even the dappled sunlight filtering into the tent seems to brighten.

“It was different after you left. You know you helped keep morale up a lot, always saying dumb things like that?” Jay rarely delivers a direct hit when he teases someone, and he never fires the opening salvo, so Leyden has no idea how to react until his smile starts to brim over with cautious delight and Leyden knows for certain that Jay’s razzing him. Just like the first time he ever stepped foot on this island, then stepped into this tent with Gene at his side and Oswald lingering behind them, when Jay muttered a disbelieving _Jesus_ over his shyly slumped shoulders with the same smile on his lips. 

Leyden wonders, for the first time, if the hesitation in that smile comes from Jay hoping his joke will be taken well or worrying that it won’t; he’s made up of equal parts worry and hope, so that’s not an easy thing to guess. All Leyden knows for certain is that if anyone ever took Jay’s harmless brand of teasing badly enough to inspire worry, he’d be there in a heartbeat to lay them out before they could move against him. 

Some of that intensely protective sentiment must show on his face, because Jay lets out a jittery laugh a propos of nothing and averts his eyes, which makes Leyden’s face get hot for just as little reason. “I heard there’s a bunch of guys going swimming down at the beach,” Jay says, a merciful break in the silence that’s settled between them. “I’ve already cleaned up a bit, but – I don’t really feel anywhere near _clean_ yet. That’d probably help, don’t you think?”

“Yeah, sure it would,” Leyden says without any real idea why Jay’s brought it up to him. After another stretch of silence, Jay gives him a look so full of exasperated annoyance that he laughs before Jay can even say a word to explain. “ _What?_ ”

“Come along,” Jay demands, and it _is_ a demand, said more firmly than Leyden’s ever heard him say anything. “Come with me.”

Not until the two of them are naked and wading knee-deep in the surf, fellow marines all around them, do several things strike Leyden for the very first time: he doesn’t just like Jay, and he’s fairly certain Jay doesn’t just like him, and Jay’s more-than-like isn’t scary enough to outweigh the overwhelming relief and reassurance that would come from an emotional sanctuary of increased closeness between them, and neither is his. He gets it now, or he thinks he does, how Gene and Snafu could look at each other the way they did on Peleliu – he still doesn’t get why _Snafu_ , of all people, but he thinks he gets what Gene was looking for and what Snafu must provide. 

Then again, he might not get it at all, because his thoughts stray well beyond emotional sanctuary as he watches Jay wade out ahead of him. But then Jay glances over his shoulder, his ever-present nervousness taking on an edge of coyness as he asks if Leyden’s just going to stay there the whole time, and Leyden decides a good deal of this will probably have to be figured out as it happens rather than before.

Jay kisses him after the others have left, his hand trembling where it sits on Leyden’s shoulder because they’ve been in the water long enough for the pleasant chill to become numbing, or at least Leyden assumes that’s what’s causing the tremor. Jay kisses him as cautiously as he’d expected, then as eagerly as he’d hoped, and only the need to keep his head above water stops him from pulling Jay right against his body to stop that shivering. Instead he just settles his hand along the shaggy overgrowth of hair at the nape of Jay’s neck, and when Jay only shivers more violently at that, he thinks: _oh_ , then reaches under the water and between Jay’s legs.

Neither of them can get and stay hard in the icy water, so they retreat far enough down the beach to be fully out of any eye line coming from camp. They’re also both unwilling to sit down in the sand, but they don’t want to put the barrier of their clothing back up when they’ve got this rare chance at privacy. Leyden holds Jay close against him just as he planned, face buried in Jay’s neck as he jerks him off with fierce concentration, then pulls him even closer when his legs wobble and he lets out a choked whimper, spilling over Leyden’s hand. 

Leyden proves nowhere near as good at being quiet as Jay was, constantly grunting and moaning and making sounds he doesn’t even know how to describe because he had no idea he could make them. “Shut up,” Jay whispers apprehensively, then squeals in shock because Leyden’s decided to use the soft spot at the juncture of Jay’s neck and shoulder to silence himself; he’s not biting all that hard, but the pressure makes Jay arch his hips into Leyden’s body with the next quick stroke of his hand, and Leyden comes with a muffled moan that, had he done nothing to deaden the sound, probably could’ve been heard in Japan. 

Jay kisses him even more while they both come down, all over his face instead of just on his mouth, and he thinks Jay must somehow be filling each one with reassurance and comfort. That strikes him as unfair when Jay’s the one who just got back from the full tour in Peleliu while he hid out in a hospital for over half, but he’s not sure he’d know how to kiss back the same way. All he can think to do is keep holding Jay close and sliding his hands up and down Jay’s back to keep him warm.

“Have you ever… done this before?” Jay asks, lips grazing Leyden’s cheek with each word, and Leyden swears he can hear Jay’s brain kicking into overdrive with pointless worry. 

“Yeah, of course I have,” Leyden says, all confidence. “I’ve done it once, just now.” He knows that Jay probably means something much larger when he says _this_ , something more like what Leyden himself contemplated as they waded into the ocean together, but Jay’s laugh in response sounds satisfied.

“It wasn’t the same without you,” Jay says, barely above a whisper, which is just different enough from _it was different after you left_ to make Leyden’s face go hot all over again.

“I’m here,” Leyden says. “I’m here now. We’re both here.” 

Because Jay _is_ here, he’s still here, and now Leyden really doesn’t like to think how he would’ve survived if that hadn’t been true. That doesn’t matter, anyway. It doesn’t even matter that they’re naked on a beach in godforsaken Pavuvu between one harrowing battle and another, because they’re both here.


End file.
